Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.
Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.
When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
That’s a tiny, tiny minority of the tech employment market and one which would readily shrug off a one-time $100K expense. (That would be less than 2 months’ salary for a high-6-figure position.)
It’s more common then people think
I'm not doubting your first statement. For your second statement, I think people probably estimate it reasonably accurately as "rare, but not extraordinarily rare nor unheard of".
Finding the top 1% gets better results if you have a wider net.
Finding the cheapest 20% does too...
These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent.
Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.
Modern AI turns skilled individuals into teams.
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
https://www.abet.org/accreditation/find-programs
Thats literally the point of getting a degree, to determine that all grads meet a set of minimum qualifications
O-1 is for exceptional talent ("extraordinary ability"). Bring exceptional talent, eliminate the H-1B visa. It's that simple.
When you actually want to identify talent, it works the same way everywhere. You find other experts in the field you can trust and ask them to use their subjective judgment. Governments don't want to do that unless it's absolutely critical, as it goes against the prevailing theory of how government bureaucracy is supposed to work. Even if the government is willing to give outside experts the power to make the decisions, the experts probably don't want to accept the liability that comes with it. Which leaves the final decisions to government officials who rarely have the expertise to evaluate the claims on their own.
Now the question is whether the US wants another visa category for finding cheap labor. I am not sure that is either needed or desired (by voters). Maybe with the exception of agriculture
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."
The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.
But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.
Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.
I’ve worked with some amazing Austrians who had to go to 3rd country for a year waiting for the lottery.
But I am American: most of us couldn't even guess our own ethnic origins after a couple generations, especially if our ancestors weren't affluent. That fundamental difference in worldview makes all these discussions so difficult.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
Also, very expensive relocation packages
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
It’s hard to get people to even interview, or find them in the first place.
Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.
When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.
Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).
But I never had the impression they cared about the amount very much.
We put people on the moon. I find it hard to believe the people here lack the raw ability. I find it much more likely businesses don’t want to give back to the country that they’re residing in.
using german nazi scienties, which is irony since they are definition of immigrant
Having a disproportionate share of the best people world wide to work with is a great privilege and advantage.
H1B were no less skilled (and no less paid) than their US-based counterparts.
You can't find someone to do a job? Then you need to compete on wage with other companies to bring someone in. Or, you know, raise your salary for local employees.
Also, how to value pre-ipo stock
There are other good options as well (an auction, etc). They all have problems, but there are mitigations. It could be vastly improved even if it’s not perfect.
It’s just the will to do it.
If you decide on a single pay cutoff software engineers will starve everyone else out. And there are of course great, well paid people in other hard to hire industries.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer...
A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."
We've had about 35 years to build a domestic pipeline of Novell NetWare, SunOS 4, Windows 3.0, and dBASE IV developers and experts.
They work abroad under the respective country's work visa. H1B is US specific, specific visa. The US has plenty of other work visas.
The law doesn't work based on your beliefs.
> someone who knows two languages isn't remarkable, someone who can teach others isn't remarkable
First: it depends on the language.
Second: the combination of two relatively commonplace skills in one person isn't commonplace. "Be top 20% in two things instead of top 5% in one thing" is standard career advice.
Putting additional restrictions and requirements for reporting would likely be a good thing. I am hesitant to say "H-1B needs to go" when it does serve other non-technical positions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende...
In the past there have been specific carve outs for specific fields. The H-1A was the section for nurses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#The_Immigration_Act_...
It might be appropriate to separate H-1T (I'm sure its not up to section T yet, using that as a placeholder) for tech workers and have some sort of proctored test to ensure that the skills represented aren't "I know how to use Claude" along with filing fees sufficient to cover the administration of the test.
This would move tech workers out of the H-1B category allowing it to return to its original intent of skilled workers (teachers, medical technicians, private sector researchers...).
Elsewhere in DOL, there's a definition of computer professional.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
The employee's primary duty must consist of:
The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;
The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or
A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.
Or if the job is classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_stru.htm#15-0000 )
All this still requires proper funding of the Department of Labor and its ability to investigate H-1B-dependent employers.
First, how do we ensure it doesn't become a slave program: that is you get hired for X, and they are paying you that, but you want to find a new job because you don't like your boss. Or perhaps they hire you for X, and you are doing Y (again, nothing illegal)
Second, you hire someone to do a job, and they realize you have to pay them and so they decide to do nothing (or get a second job that they are working instead).
I can find answers to all of the above, but they all fail to: somebody is aware of your solution - how are they going to abuse it. I haven't solved this secondary abuse issue.
Stack rank would just give all the visas to big tech and starve US hospitals and every other industry
Nursing does pay a lot and conditions havent changed much over the years. Certified anesthesiology nurses get paid like $132/hr, and still there is shortage.
Considering salary based on country of origin, adjusted for position, would probably be the best way to ensure little abuse (apart from the indentured servitude-like features). If you want to hire the best, they'll be overpaid in their origin markets.
But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further.
But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.
I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates.
One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.
> Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
Yes.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
This is what laws are for. "You can just do things."
> It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
So is collecting taxes, you just have a government funded entity grind tirelessly to keep closing the gaps. You make it economically burdensome to attempt to workaround. There will always be some leakage. "Work is hard." We know the labor exists in the US. We know offshoring is used to improve profit margins and to disempower workers to get more out of them. It is worth the effort, imho, if you want to keep the capital in the US versus sending it overseas and prioritize domestic workers over someone else's profits.
[1] https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-saas-taxability-in...
“China” “National Security”
And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.
> Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed.
Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing.
What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 100M people in the US labor force? I am genuinely interested, both as a scholar and as market opportunity.
The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore.
If you tax renting labour, then companies seeking to do this will just enter into long enough service contracts to have the outsourcing agency custom-build a SaaS just for you instead.
The market opportunity here is simply to be an outsourced body shop.
It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life.
It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs."
Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.
It doesn't totally fix them, but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment. It also stops companies from using H1-Bs as a mechanism to reduce overhead.
> I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.
I'd be for that as well. If someone comes in on a work visa I want them to either have full access to the labor market with all the freedoms any american citizen has, or I want their compensation to be high enough to justify locking them to a company and out of the general labor market.
How so? It increases the cost to the employer to hire an H1B employee, so they might hire less of them. But it could also mean they pay the employee less to compensate for the higher cost of bringing them in to the country.
Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.
My employer sells software internationally - are you claiming any international job should be subject to some sort of fine simply because the company is HQed in the US?
I suppose we could try slicing revenue or profit by sales region and comparing against headcount expense per region? But with salaries abroad being a fraction of in the US, that math might still work out in favor of keeping international employees.
EDIT - I dislike the H1B system overall. Just not sure "fine companies that operate overseas" is something we should consider as a replacement.
We should find way to improve the system.
Local SMEs (regulatory requirements), sales, local implementation teams, HR / legal (to support the previous employees). And engineers.
Sales and implementation could maybe be US-based, but then we're flying them around the globe. Not sure that makes sense vs hiring locals.
SMEs, similar story - not always available in the US.
The engineers are the only ones that could realistically be co-located in the US. But, a good chunk of those were acqui-hired, so now you're asking them all to relocate to the US? Not sure that's viable in the best of times, and definitely not in today's ass-backwards political climate.
If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.
H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.